Computational Modeling of a Novel Mitral Valve Stent

Although percutaneous heart valve replacement is getting known amongst cardiovascular surgical procedures, as it was recently introduced, and reports of early clinical experience been published, this technique is limited to the replacement of pulmonary and aortic valves in old patients who cannot undergo open heart surgery. One of the reasons is the uphill challenges in the generation of an ideal design that would address anchorage and leakage issues. Stent anchorage and paravalvular leaks prove to the greatest challenge posed to biomedical design engineers. This paper describes a novel Nitinol based mitral valve stent that addresses migration and paravalvular leaks associated with the bioprosthetic mitral valve. The geometry-based model presented here specifically addresses issues of valve migration and paravalvular leaks This is of great interest to designers of new prosthetic heart valve models, as well as to surgeons involved in valve sparing surgery. Simulation results show that the studied stent design seemed to be good by virtue of its acceptable maximum crimping strain.